What are feed readers?

Feed readers, also known as RSS readers or news aggregators, are software applications that let users subscribe to online sources like news sites and blogs, and then automatically collect newly published content from these sources in one centralized location.

They achieve this by repeatedly checking these sources for new content, saving it in their database, and showing it all in an aggregated view for easy consumption by users.

It enables users to subscribe to dozens, or even hundreds, of websites and view all their updates in a single interface, rather than visiting each site individually.

How feed readers work

The concept of feed readers is closely tied to "content syndication" - the practice of making web content available for use on other websites or applications. Through feeds (structured data formats like RSS, Atom, or JSON Feed), websites publish a list of content updates that is understandable by software, and allow their material to be aggregated and displayed in feed readers.

Feed readers are based on those web feeds. Their users subscribe to the feeds they’re interested in, and the feed reader takes it from there.

The subscribed feeds are regularly checked for updates by requesting the latest version of the web feed, and then compared to the previous version. Based on that they determine which the new articles are.

When new content is detected, it is processed further. Typically this includes parsing the content and extracting the main text, images, metadata, generating summaries, and so on.

The feed reader then stores the content and any additional data in its internal database, and shows it to the users who subscribed to the respective feed.

Typical use-cases

Arguably the most common use-case is staying up to date with news. By subscribing to trusted news websites and publications, users can get timely updates about significant local, national, or global events from a diverse list of sources.

For professionals and enthusiasts, keeping up with specialized topics is another key use-case, particularly valuable for those working in rapidly evolving fields like technology.

Software engineers, for example, often use feed readers to follow technical blogs, documentation updates, industry news, and open-source project news. This makes it easy to stay at the forefront of their field, all without manually searching for updates.

Feed readers are also useful for lifelong learning and personal development. By subscribing to feeds from educational websites, online magazines, and thought leaders, users can continuously discover new ideas, methods, and perspectives, which supports regular learning and satisfies intellectual curiosity.

Additionally, companies often use feed readers for monitoring market trends. They subscribe to feeds from competitors, industry news, regulatory bodies, or financial publications to get timely updates of changes in the market, risks, and opportunities.

Benefits of feed readers

The most fundamental benefit of feed readers is aggregation in one place. They gather content from dozens or even hundreds of different websites, blogs, and news sources into a single interface, allowing users to easily monitor and read new content without visiting each site individually. This saves time and makes it much easier to stay on top of updates.

Another significant benefit is managing newsletters outside the inbox. Some feed readers allow users to subscribe to email newsletters directly, so they don’t clutter their email inbox. Instead, newsletters appear alongside other feeds, making it simpler to keep all reading material organized in the same place.

Feed readers also give users more control over content. While social media platforms use algorithms to decide what users see, feed readers display all posts from subscribed feeds in chronological order. This ensures that no content is hidden or deprioritized, and gives readers complete control over the content they see.

Besides that, feed readers typically offer a clean, focused reading view with minimal ads, notifications, or unrelated content, which reduces distractions. This allows users to engage with the information they want without the common interruptions on the web.

Types of feed readers

Web-based SaaS readers operate entirely in the cloud and are accessible through web browsers. These services maintain dedicated servers to continuously check subscribed feeds regardless if users are actively logged in or not, ensuring that no content is missed, and immediately available when users access the service. Examples include Feedly, Inoreader, and Lighthouse.

Another variant of web-based readers are self-hosted ones. Users deploy them on their own servers. It is more effort and requires technical knowledge, but they offer greater control, privacy, and customization options. Examples are Tiny Tiny RSS, FreshRSS, and Miniflux.

Desktop and mobile applications run locally on the device, and therefore can only check feeds when they’re open, either running in the foreground or background. They also cannot offer features that require dedicated infrastructure, like newsletter subscriptions via email. But they are simpler to use than self-hosted web-based readers and offer a similar level of control. Examples include NetNewsWire, RSS Guard and Reeder for desktop, Fiery Feeds, and NewsBlur for mobile.

Browser extensions are lightweight feed readers that run within a web browser. They allow users to quickly subscribe to and read feeds without leaving the browser, and often provide notifications for new articles and simple organizational tools. However, they are not as powerful as the previous options. For example Feedbro.

There are also built-in feed readers, often in email clients and browsers. Outlook and Thunderbird are prime examples of email clients that allow subscribing to RSS feeds, and Vivaldi is a browser that has this feature. They are similar to browser extension in terms of features and ease of use. Easy to use, but limited in features compared to dedicated options.

Feed readers vary widely in their feature sets, user interfaces, and technical knowledge requirements, even within each category. When choosing a reader it’s best to try out a few different options to see which one fits the best for the desired workflow.

Key features

As with any software, feed readers can have an endless list of features. This list here is a basic overview of what features they could have and make the most sense. Going beyond that is always possible.

Must haves

The features that any feed reader absolutely must have is subscribing to feeds, regularly checking feeds, and storing content. If software implements these features and shows the stored content to users, it can be called a feed reader.

However, if a product implements only those features, the experience for users won’t be great. There are a lot of optional features that feed readers should have to improve the user experience.

Basic optional features

One of the first features any reader software adds is a dedicated reading view. They extract the main text and images from articles, cleaning up formatting and removing unnecessary elements, and provide a clear, distraction-free reading interface.

Support for import and export of feeds via OPML is important for portability. OPML files allow users to transfer their list of subscriptions between different feed readers or back them up.

When users have more than a couple subscribed feeds, organizing feeds and content into folders or tags becomes crucial.

Manual adding of content (via URLs) lets users save individual articles or web pages directly to the feed reader, even if the website does not offer a feed. This is useful for bookmarking or saving content discovered elsewhere. Since feed readers are typically also used to manage bookmarked content, this feature is quite important.

The ability to search and filter saved articles is an essential feature to find specific information, authors, or topics, especially when managing large amounts of content. There are different levels of sophistication of search, from substring matching to vector search.

Advanced features

As mentioned before, many web-based feed readers offer subscribing to newsletters via email. It enables users to receive email newsletters directly in their feed reader, keeping them separate from their email inbox and consolidating all reading material in one place.

Rules make it possible to automate certain actions, like removing specific low-value articles or tagging them based on keywords, sources, or other criteria. It helps users deal with large amounts of content.

LLMs made it relatively easy to offer AI features such as summaries and “Ask AI” (the ability to ask a question that’s answered based on the contents of an article). It can effectively replace skimming articles or looking for specific information. Another AI feature that Lighthouse pioneered is the “About sentence”, a one sentence summary describing what the article is about. This effectively eliminates the impact of clickbait.

For especially advanced users, API access and third-party integrations are valuable. APIs allow feed readers to connect with other applications, synchronize data with mobile apps, or automate workflows. Support for legacy APIs such as the Google Reader API can also add compatibility with a wide range of third-party tools.

Conclusion

Web feeds, the technology feed readers are based on, have existed since 1999, and feed readers since the early 2000s. Their highest adoption was in the early 2010s, the discontinuation of Google Reader in 2013 was a blow to the whole sector. It led to a widespread, but untrue, sentiment that “RSS is dead”.

Despite the sentiment, RSS and other web feed formats are widely supported. Virtually all software used for content publishing also publishes either RSS or Atom feeds, and allows feed readers to subscribe to them.

And there continues to be a lot of innovation in the space, with products like Readwise Reader, Folo, Lighthouse, and many others.

Feed readers continue to be the only way to have full control over content consumption, where it’s possible to get a wide variety of news and other content, which is important to get a well-rounded information diet.

Having this alternative to traditional media consumption is particularly important in the current tumultuous times, where social media (the dominant news source today) and politics becomes more and more emotionally charged.